Exposed
I didn't know what the argument between Beto and his agent, Riccardo Zaniolo, was all about, but Beto came storming out of the A.S. Roma locker room in high dungeon and growled, "Let's go to dinner. The hotel restaurant." He was a star center-half defender for Rome's football team, which had just defeated AC Milan on their home turf, with Beto a standout in the game, so I don't know what the problem between Beto and his agent was. But as Beto's trainer, bodyguard, and gofor--at least for public consumption, and in actual fact--I followed along behind. Something was strange, though, and something had been strange with Beto for a couple of days. He usually wasn't in a perpetual mad like he'd been for a week and we never ate meals together in public. We didn't do anything together, as anything like equals, in public.
What was between Beto and me was a very private matter. Beto had always insisted on that. He had a macho man public image to maintain.
I was Canadian, so not really part of this Italian world. I had the build of a bodyguard and the training of a physical trainer, so we'd always managed to bring it off, this image of handsome and sexy Beto as the macho international soccer star, who played the field and wasn't going to let any woman pin him down. To the world I was just his shadow, walking beyond him, outside of his spotlight. He worked hard at playing the field of models and other beautiful women, but, by nature, I was his top and he was my bottom.
That had always been very hush hush, and, going straight from Milan's Stadio Giuseppi Meazza football stadium to the Aurora Restaurant in our hotel, the Meliá Milano, and entering the restaurant together was a completely new thing for us.
"I can eat later, Beto," I said.
"Sit," he growled, so I sat there, at the table, across from him, with him giving a "just dare to ask or comment" look to those he caught giving him a curious look. This was almost everyone in the restaurant, as he was a celebrity here. As we ate, I asked him what was wrong and he wouldn't say what it was other than "life" and "snooping" and his agent, Zaniolo. I knew not to press him when he was in this mood.
As I feared, he was spotted by someone from the media in the restaurant and a flash bulb went off. I made a move to go after the photographer, but Beto placed his hand on my arm, which caused another flash to go off, and said, "Fuck it. Sit and enjoy your meal, Jack. Tell me what you thought about the game against Milan. Was I robbed of a goal there at the end, or not?"
After we were done eating, I said, "You go ahead. I'll settle the bill and go to my room. Call me there if and when you want me to come to you. I've put a key card under your napkin in case you want to come to me tonight. Room 1126."
"I'll wait until you pay for us and then we'll go up together--to my room," he answered. "I want you now. I'm keyed up."
"Go on and I'll follow," I said. I looked around to see if the photographer was still there. This wouldn't do. This wouldn't do at all. We'd been so careful.
"We'll go together," he declared. Beto had a junior suite at the hotel and I was booked in a distant single I probably wouldn't be spending much time in. We had never gone to the elevators together to go to our rooms, though. This time we did. More flashes from cameras went off as we stood at the elevators, and, once again, Beto put a hand on my forearm intimately and leaned in to kiss me on the neck before the elevator doors opened.
What in the hell was going on here, I wondered. We had very carefully avoided showing anything like this in the year I'd been working for and spiking the international soccer star on the sly. I may be the boss on the bed, but, in public, I was just a smear on the wall.
* * * *
Usually I played traditional Japanese wife with Beto in public. I followed a good six feet behind, eyes lowered unless I was on the lookout for threats to Beto, usually in the form of adoring female fans. That was my personal body guard role in public. In private, though, when it was just the two of us, Beto was the one who played wifey--and a very needy wifey indeed. Although trim and well-muscled enough, he had the height and build of a classic soccer player, built for speed and maneuverability, not the height and weight to compete with a bodybuilder like me. He was strong enough, but I had him by forty pounds of hard muscle and by three inches in height. He liked to be subdued and then ravished. That was fine with me.
Beto liked it that way. When we were alone and stripped, he worshipped my body and was a total submissive to me. He knew, intimately, every square inch of my muscular frame with his hands and his lips. I was hung and he wasn't and he danced and writhed on my cock, lying under me, docilely, wanting me to take him hard. I did. His fans just wouldn't have understood his need or that a man fulfilled it. He often said that it was me his women fans should pursued rather than him because I could give them what they wanted from him better than he could.
It was no different that day, other than we went, boldly and openly, straight to his room, rather than me stealing there from mine sometime later in the night. We always did have sex after one of his soccer matches, the sex wilder when he'd had a win, but he seemed extra desperate this night, stripping me, pushing me down on my back on his bed, making love to every square inch of my body, and then me turning him, slapping his legs apart, mounting and thrust up inside him, and pounding, pounding, pounding, as he wrapped his legs around my waist, dug his fingernails into my shoulder blades, and rocked hard against my pelvis to take me deep. On this night, after we'd both fired off, I made to roll off him, but he clutched at me.
"No, no. Stay inside me. Fuck me again." And so I did.
It wasn't like him--not having sex--but in having it like there may be no tomorrow, no following night of sex. I was worried about what was worrying him, but he wasn't telling me and I wasn't really in charge here. I had to wait for him to name it--if he ever was going to.
Afterward, after strong-finish seconds, as we lay side by side on the bed, panting, he merely said. "We're going up to Lake Como for a few days. Have you ever been there?"
"No, I haven't," I said. "I've heard about it, though. Some movies were filmed there, weren't there?"
"Yes," he said. "It's a good place for fantasy and make believe, although I want to go in the other direction. I think you'll like it there. I've rented a house on the lake. A house completely open to the world. I think that's appropriate. It has its secrets, but we are going there to dispense with those."
I might have asked him more, but by the time he'd stopped speaking, he was drowsy and had dozed off. He had exhausted himself--partly because he'd played so hard on the soccer field, partly because he'd taken my cock so hard, but mostly, I think, because he had exhausted himself with whatever was eating him and that he was refusing to let out.
At some point, he'd tell me--and I was afraid it was something I didn't want to hear. I'd become more than fond of him and happy with our arrangement.
* * * *
The house on Lake Como that Beto drove me to was fantastic, but it wasn't anything like what I expected. It was a two-story glass cube set on the very edge of the lake, seeming to jut out over the lake and sitting on a rock-walled ground floor that disappeared into a hillside mound to the left of the driveway over a car garage. The hill blocked a full view of the house from the SS36 rim road around the lake, although you could see enough of the glass cube from the road to be intrigued by it. The two-story glass cube of the house was all glass--and I mean all glass. Beto took me directly from the ground-floor rock walled, floored, and ceilinged entrance foyer, up the open glass-tread spiral staircase into the transparent cube. All of the exterior and interior walls were made of glass, and the floor and even the ceiling when I looked up on the second floor were made out of transparent acrylic. The glass in the walls to the two bathrooms off the bedrooms were glass block, but they were still glass and only diffused the shadows of what was inside. They didn't obliterate them.
This was the most open-to-the-world's gaze structure I'd ever seen. Beto couldn't have found a place with less privacy. This was the opposite of how he and I had lived for the past year.
All of the furnishings were white and sleek and low-slung, leaving the impression of living in an iceberg--one that was completely open to the world. No secrets, no hidden agendas. Beto told me that wasn't really true about the house but that it wasn't something that needed to concern us--that he'd taken care of that. I was too fascinated with the place to pursue that point.
This was downright fantastic and nothing like any of the classical Beaux-Arts and Italianate architecture of the lakeside buildings I'd seen on the lake shore as we drove northeast from where we hit the lake at Lecco. It also was in no way reflective of the hidden relationship Beto and I had been in for a year.
"I know," Beto said when I asked him about that. "This is so open. I want a break from the past. That's what I thought of when the agency told me this was for rent."
"It's all very grand," I said. "But it leaves us exposed. I don't see that there are any blinds or anything. At night this will be a lantern, exposed to anyone out on the lake or across on the other shore. We aren't far from the other side."
"Yes, there are blinds within the walls, but I have no intention of using them."
"Well, that's fine for you, but what if I want more privacy? Where will I sleep? Even in the second bedroom, it will look like I am in here with you."
"There's another bedroom on the first floor, behind the garage, under the hill," Beto said "But I picked this precisely because it's exposed. You will sleep in here, with me, on the master bed, of course. We will make wild love here that can be seen for miles up and down the lake. There is a system to screen the glass, but we won't use it unless we find the glare at some time during the day is too much." He walked over to a nightstand attached to one side of the bed and flipped a switch. Immediately, the wall of glass toward the lake became opaque, swirls of cloudy material rising between the panes of glass. It didn't shut out the light, but it glazed over what could be seen from the outside in much the same way that the glass blocks did for the bathroom walls.
"This isn't like you, Beto. Tell me what's wrong."
"Come, let's walk into Colico for a drink at a café, and I'll tell you what you want to hear."
This sounded strangely like a "kiss off" line to me--like, after a year, I was being dismissed when I thought we had so much going for us. It wasn't the first time I'd been wrong about my love life, though. That gave me pause. I hadn't thought about our relationship being a love life. We were two men--macho men I liked to think. We didn't do "love." We did sex. Maybe I should have given that more thought. For now, I could hold it back until we had taken that walk into the nearby lakeside town and I'd gotten the bad news.
When we got back down into the foyer on the ground floor, I saw that there were four doors other than the front entry off the room.
"Where do those doors go?" I asked. "If one of them is to that bedroom you say is down here, maybe this is where I should sleep."
"This one on the wall toward the hill is to the garage," he said. "The other one on that wall is to the bedroom and the one across the foyer from that is into a room under the glass cube. Those two doors are locked. There isn't anything in there we need. The one at the back is locked too. It goes out to a sunken patio cut into the hillside behind the bedroom and to stairs up to the pool terrace at the back of the house, accessible off the first floor of the glass cube. This is called The Glass House, by the way."
"Locked doors?" I asked.
"Yes. That isn't any part of what is us."
